CALAMITY HOWLER/A.V. Krebs

Family Farmers Battle Apathy, Policies, Myths

Amidst the recent sound and fury over such issues as genetic
engineering, mad cow disease, the quality, safety and quantity of the
food we manufacture, etc., the fate of this nation's historical
family farm system of agriculture is being all but ignored -- by
both progressives and reactionaries -- considered by many of these
same folks as simply a relic of a bygone era.

Typical of such cynicism are the remarks made recently by Ken
Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group who throughout
recent years has repeatedly demonstrated his lack of understanding of
agricultural economics. Saying that he was "skeptical that nostalgia
will be discarded," it was Cook and his organization that compiled
lists of growers who received subsidies amounting to tens of
thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"Gee, it's served them so well," he said, referring to nostalgia.
"Usually, that's what they trot out when they're looking for more
subsidy money."

By focusing so much media attention on the "subsidy question"
during the debate on the 2002 Farm Bill, Cook's naïveté
allowed in large measure corporate agribusiness to fashion
legislation of the corporate interests, by the corporate interests
and for the corporate interests.

As Keith Mudd, a farmer near Monroe City, Mo., has pointed out
"The Environmental Working Group argues that most of the subsidies go
to the largest of farmers, who in turn use it to buy out their
smaller neighbors. The truth is that all farmers, regardless of size,
must use the subsidy just to raise the value received for their
commodity above the cost of production. In most instances, the cost
of production is covered and something is left over for living
expenses. In practically no instance is anything left over that would
be considered a return on investment (land and equity).

"Most problems on the farms of rural American," Mudd stresses,
"can be traced to one fundamental cause. The underlying problem with
farm income is concentration. As our input suppliers and the
purchasers of our products consolidate, they acquire market power.
This market power is leveraged against the farmer when he sells his
crop. ... Look somewhere else for a scapegoat; it is not the American
farmer draining the United States Treasury. The real transfer of
wealth is accumulating in Cargill and ADM's bank accounts."

Likewise, as Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot, co-directors of the
prestigious Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington
D.C., recently pointed out, "While many of the agricultural subsidies
in rich countries are poorly targeted, and in some cases hurt farmers
in developing nations, it is important not to exaggerate these
impacts. The risk of doing so is that it encourages policy makers and
concerned NGOs to focus their energies on an issue that is largely
peripheral to economic development, and ignore much more important
matters."

Both at home and abroad corporate agribusiness' minions have long
argued that agriculture to be successful must be "industrialized"
which in turn, they have argued, relies on concentrating resources
into as few hands as possible.

Agrarian populism at the close of the 19th century clearly
recognized that condition and thus believed that it was imperative to
bring the corporate state under democratic control. "Agrarian
reformers," historian Lawrence Goodwin stresses, "attempted to
overcome a concentrating system of finance capitalism that was rooted
in Eastern commercial banks and which radiated outward through
trunk-line railroad networks to link in a number of common purposes
much of America's consolidating corporate community. Their aim was
structural reform of the American economic system."

That effort, which Ralph Nader often points out, is "still the
country's most fundamental political and economic reform" and laid
the ground work for the Progressives, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom
and later Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and more recently the
Great Society. The creative economic and social policies that these
programs spawned dominated the political and economic scene
throughout the entire 20th century and thwarted for the most part the
complete de-structuring of family farm agriculture in the US.

It was not until 1996 and the infamous "Freedom to Farm"
legislation was fashioned by a Republican Congress and signed by a
Democrat president that corporate agribusiness finally realized their
dream of robbing family farmers of their nearly last vestiges of that
economic power first conceived and asserted by the agrarian populists
a century earlier.

Thus, by deifying "cost benefit analysis" at the expense of the
"common good," corporate agribusiness has all but managed to
completely annul the positive dimensions of the family farm system
and eliminate its economic and environmental advantages, particularly
as they relate to building genuine communities.

As social anthropologists Patricia L. Allen and Carolyn E. Sachs
point out, any system built upon a foundation of structural
inequities "is ultimately unsustainable in the sense that it will
result in increasing conflict and struggle along the lines of class,
gender, and ethnicity." Corporate agribusiness has become just such a
system.

And as corporate agribusiness seeks to metamorphose agriculture
from a culture based upon the traditional family farm system of
agriculture into a business where capital is substituted for genuine
economic, social and environmental efficiency, and where expensive
technology is substituted for labor we see a standardization of our
food supply through an industrial manufacturing process based on the
creation of synthetic foods, such as is now taking place through the
use of genetic engineering.

Considering those characteristics by which corporate agribusiness
has become identified with and comparing them with the historical
characteristics of the family farm/peasant system of agriculture we
begin to see more clearly how corporate agribusiness is the
antithesis of family farm agriculture and how incompatible the two
systems are in a democratically structured society.

Whereas family farming/peasant agriculture has traditionally
sought to nurture and care for the land, corporate agribusiness,
exclusive by nature, seeks to "mine" the land, solely interested in
monetizing its natural wealth and thus measure efficiency by its
profits, by pride in its "bottom line." Family farmers, meanwhile,
see efficiency in terms of respecting, caring and contributing to the
overall health and well-being of the land, the environment, the
communities and the nations in which they live.

While corporate agribusiness stresses institutionalized
organization, hierarchical decision making, volume, speed,
standardization of the food supply and extracting as much production
from the land as quickly and impersonally as possible, family farmers
and peasants strive through order, labor, pride in the quality of
their work, and a certain strength of character and sense of
community to take from the land only what it is willing to give so as
not to damage its dependability or diminish its sustainability.